In the new book, Singular Beauty, photographer Cara Phillips takes viewers into the heart of what she calls the “industrial beauty complex.”

“Cosmetic surgery is really kind of the ultimate expression of beauty and I wanted to go into the belly of the beast,” she says.

For the project, Phillips scoured the pages of fashion magazines like Vogue or Allure for expert surgeons mentioned in articles about cosmetic surgery. If she were to have surgery herself, she thought, this is where she'd go to find her doctor. Most of the surgeons she found this way were happy to let her photograph their offices.

Wealthy and celebrity clients have undoubtedly visited her shooting locations, but for Phillips the project is about the promise of perfection, and whether having the ability to suck fat out of someone means that we should.

While not a new issue, her oddly beautiful photos of the industry's infrastructure are nuanced and insightful, partly because they come from Phillips' own personal issues with ideas of beauty. From ages 8 to 15 she was a child model and for much of her 20s she worked as a makeup artist where her job was to try and identify a cosmetic problem that each customer had and then suggest the makeup that she could sell to fix it.

“I loved the art part of it,” she says. “But I struggled with immorality of it and it became emotionally difficult.”

During that time Phillips herself was also struggling with an eating disorder — a by-product, she says, of her time as a child model. “Beauty was the only value from a young age that I had placed on me.”

When she delved into photography, the beauty industry quickly became Phillips' area of focus. After several years of exploring how she might capture her ideas, she landed on cosmetic surgery.

“It became this amazing metaphor for just how much we wanted to be beautiful,” she says.

Afraid her photos could be used as blunt tools to shame or judge patients, she opted to keep the photos about the offices themselves. Her negative relationship with the camera from modeling, always being asked to perform, further guided her decision.

“I wasn’t so interested in taking pictures that solved things,” she said. “I was much more interested in raising the issues.”

For her, cosmetic surgery represents a line between nature and technology that many people often don't realize is being crossed. Unlike plastic surgery, which was invented to help people recover from injuries or other medical problems, cosmetic surgery tries to reshuffle the biological deck of cards we are dealt if we don't like the hand.

The photos themselves play with both sides of the issue. They are severe and sterile, speaking to the fear and repulsion many people have for any kind of cosmetic manipulation, but they also display the glossy appeal they are meant to comment on.

“The beauty of the images is meant to help us understand that we all realize there is something seductive about beauty,” she says.

Phillips says the project helped her overcome her eating disorder but suspects that like most people she'll always have an ambivalent relationship with the notion of beauty.

“This was a way for me to directly confront the issue,” she says. “But as a woman living in our current culture, I think it’s going to be a lifetime struggle."